22. Mason #2
She cracked open the cap of her bottle. “You remembered.”
“Every word.”
Her cheeks flushed and she toyed with the plastic ring around the lid. “I had an interview, but there’s only a handful of spots. I’m not expecting to get in everywhere.” She shrugged and shifted beside me, the awkwardness rolling off her, then took a sip from her bottle.
Lilah had worked harder than anyone I knew at Hawthorne Prep. She was always studying, always working, always pushing for more. The hunger in her was a lot like mine when it came to hockey, but how she couldn’t see all she had to offer hit me hard. “You’ve got to be top three in our class.”
“Twelfth in the class, actually, but it’s still in the top five percent.”
“How the hell can they say no?”
“Said like someone who’s never been rejected.” With a wooden laugh, she took a quick sip from her bottle. “You must have scouts beating down your door with one offer letter after another.”
“Not really. My father’s locked down my offer, but they’re holding off on the commitment letter until they see how the season goes and my hand.” I flexed my reconstructed hand. The breaks had healed so well I almost never even noticed any lingering aches.
Lilah gripped my chin and yanked it toward her with a storm brewing in her eyes. “You don’t have your offer and you botched your last game—for what? To get my attention?” Her anger was glorious. She wore it like a regal cloak, nostrils flared, eyes flinty and sharp.
My entire focus was on her fingers on my skin.
“I’ve got plenty more games this season.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her touch gentled, lingering on my chin, then trailed down my neck with goosebump-raising gentleness until she rested it on my shoulder.
“Maybe not to you, but it does to me. Don’t put that on my conscience, Mason.”
I rubbed her hand on my shoulder, tracing my thumb over her knuckles. “It won’t happen again.”
Her gaze softened, anger no longer sparking. “It better not.”
“Who knew you cared so much?”
She dropped her hand, scooted away a little and took another sip from her water.
Something about her college plans nudged at my mind, going back to our talks over the summer. “How many applications are you putting in for fashion design?”
She started and a little water spilled down her chin.
I yanked a clean workout towel from the stack behind the couch and handed it to her.
“Fashion design? None. Even being a buyer for a fashion retailer is a cutthroat job.”
“I literally bash heads in on the ice.”
“You’ve never seen The Devil Wears Prada, have you?”
“No.”
“Exactly. Brutal, fickle, ruthless.”
“Come on, it’s clothes.”
“And expensive. You have to devote years to unpaid internships and grunt work and the only people who can afford that usually have rich parents paying for everything.”
“Maybe I should go into fashion design.”
She laughed, her shoulders relaxing some. “Maybe. Hockey player fashion. An untapped market.”
“You’ve never thought about doing the clothes thing for a living?”
“The clothes thing.” Her lips thinned. “Of course I have. I’ve also thought about what it would feel like to eat a croissant in Paris or fly first class or find the end of a rainbow.
A lot of things roll around up here”—she tapped the side of her head—“that aren’t going to happen. Medicine checks all my boxes.”
“And what boxes are those?”
“Medicine is an in-demand field. It’s stable, pays well, and as long as I maintain my rank, I get the Windsor Award, which means I won’t graduate with enough debt to bankrupt a small country.”
“Isn’t there a fashion scholarship too? There’s a great school that does art and fashion and stuff up in Rhode Island.
” There were flyers in the sewing room. Lilah’s sketchbook from the summer had been filled with detailed, interesting and pretty designs.
I knew jack shit about fashion, but it all looked good to me.
Her meticulous little bits of fabric and notes in her book—she loved this stuff.
Plus, she had the technical skill. She’d spent hours and hours in the sewing lab like I had on the ice. Why couldn’t she do it for real?
“Okay, let’s play out your little scenario.” Her voice took on an annoyed edge. “Let’s say I did go to college for fashion design. Then what?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“Exactly.” Lilah shifted and tucked one leg under herself, becoming more animated.
I liked her getting more comfortable in my space.
“You have to make the connections in fashion and do every unpaid and low-paid bit of dirty, tedious work. Short of someone’s parents fully funding a fashion collection and buying their way into a fashion week, it’s years of grunt work. Do you know how much fabric costs?”
“A lot?” I offered up, knowing it was a moronic answer but loving how excited talking about this made her.
“So expensive. And you need space. Space, a sewing machine, a tailor’s dummy.
I’m talking the most basics of basics here.
Throw in small things like good zippers, buttons, beading.
” She flinched like she’d been pricked. “There’s another dress of my mom’s I wanted to finish.
She bought the vintage beads at an estate sale and got them dirt cheap.
I looked into finishing the dress because all the beads are gone, and I swear, it would cost a kidney to finish it all. ”
“But once you get all the supplies, then people can buy your work.”